I, for one, am OK with Alex's take on the whole advertising thing. I block when ads are stupid and annoying (which they usually are), but if Alex plans to filter them to who he knows + Google's algorithms for text-only ads, then I think I will unblock the ads now. The real WTF is why Google went to 3rd-party ads. It was a spammers dream come true, and it's come true on nearly every blog I read - the Google image ads now truly do suck.

I don't mind you putting up ad, but please don't put any gifs up and host them on your own system!

I use adblock, not because I want to rob publishers of their money, but because I'm sick and tired of waiting for some obscure adserver.de to serve up the image so firefox can render the page.

Also lately quite a lot of ad-rotation systems have been serving up viruses, so please Alex, keep the banners hosted on your own system (if they where I wouldn't be blocking the stuff on the left - currently a blank space) and I'll happily ignore them, rather than blocking them. (From Denmark so most ads served are bloody useless)

I'm not sure what control you have over this, but the "animated" ads are the ones I hate most. If AdBlock had a way to block only those ads, that would be how I would use the tool. text ads, and non-animated image ads are fine with me.

Here's the deal. I don't block all ads, just ones that interfere with my ability to use a site. That usually means intellitext-style hideous double-underscore links, ads with sound, and ads with distracting amounts of animation.

Disabling Ad-block. No way! If the marketing weasels think they can just force their shit down my throat then they are wrong. Just do it the Google ads way or die! Oh, you don't like market forces at work? Well that's just too bad.

I still see "Sponsored by", but I think there might have been banners at some point. Adblock took them away.

For what it's worth, I don't use filtersets. I have very simple criteria for deciding what to block: Anything animated, particularly anything flash, because animations are distracting and flash ads to page load time, CPU usage, and browser instability.

I don't mind static images, and I don't mind text ads. I don't mind the concept of advertising, and I will often follow the links. But my allergy to animated ads (say that ten times fast) comes from sites which manage to cram the actual content into 30% of the page width, and big, flashing (literally!) ads into the other 70% -- at that point, it actually becomes difficult to read the page without first disabling the ads.

I work for a company with an ad-supported business model -- I've worked for two, actually -- so I understand the need. But in the first company, when we sat down to have meetings, we'd try to think where we can get away with putting more ads -- if we can put interstitials on the mobile site, say, or if there's room for video ads in the flow of the article.

The company I work for now has meetings where we ask "Will this be too annoying?" and actually pass up on potential revenue because "It'd piss me off."